Selecting shut down and reboot from windows brought a black screen and blinking cursor with Grub failing to start. The LXF Disaster Recovery Kit on the LXF166 Disc saved the day and at least boots the installed OpenSUSE. However try as I might I have not been able to restore normal startup.

None of the following worked though each reported completing successfully:
- Grub terminal find menu.lst and setup
- Yast bootloader option using previously working settings
- Yast restore backup MBR
- Win recovery fix startup problems, Windows reports "the partition table does not have a valid System Partition" then "repair completed successfully"

My preference would be to fix this, any suggestions or help would be appreciated.

Last edited by LGOG on Tue Apr 09, 2013 11:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thanks for the response but no windows doesn't boot, the system hangs after POST so nothing boots. I tried each of those things in turn rebooting each time. I was willing to let windows overwrite the MBR knowing I could restore GRUB if that worked. All the windows recovery seems to do is make sda1 active, where SUSE default is sda4, with my partition setup.

I've been able to make changes to the partition table using gparted so I don't think it's the problem. It is as if the first sectors of the MBR are not being written to or read, but I am at a loss how to test for that.